Why NC voted for Trump, then elected several Democrats for top state races

CHARLOTTE, N.C. ( QUEEN CITY NEWS ) — If this election is revealing anything, it's that the Tar Heel state is purple.

North Carolinians split their votes between Democrats and Republicans up and down the ballot.

Looking at this year's voter numbers by registration, they're almost even:

The voters who delivered Democratic wins for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and superintendent of public instruction are the same ones who cast their ballots to put Donald Trump back in the top office.

"I don't think they were voting red or blue down the ticket and I think they were making some choices," said Dr. Susan Roberts, political science professor at Davidson College.

The biggest choice of the night was electing Trump as the 47th president of the United States. North Carolina was the first battleground state called.

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The results for governor came in very quickly, with Josh Stein beating Mark Robinson by about 15 percentage points.

"Mark Robinson was such a, what we would call in political science, such a flawed candidate that it would've been impossible for him to have garnered the same kind of enthusiasm that Trump did in North Carolina," said Roberts.

Some blame the GOP lieutenant governor, saying his extreme comments and the allegations against him hurt other Republicans down the ticket. Fortunately for the GOP, political experts said the association between Trump and Robinson evidently didn't stick.

"Voters and the public and the pundits and the journalists have gotten accustomed to Trump's reckless use of language and perhaps the locker room talk," said Roberts. "It really does pale in comparison to some of the things that the CNN alleged that Robinson had engaged in."

While the gubernatorial race wasn't a close one, several others were. Democrats Rachel Hunt, Jeff Jackson and Mo Green all edged out their opponents.

"You have a number of voters in North Carolina who tend to think that national Democratic candidates are too liberal but are more willing to support more moderate local candidates," said Dr. Eric Heberlig, a political science professor at UNC Charlotte.

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Rachel Hunt will be our next lieutenant governor. Jeff Jackson will take over as attorney general. Mo Green will serve as superintendent of public instruction.

"I think there were sometimes maybe reasons unique to every race," said Roberts. "Maybe Rachel Hunt won some of the older vote because of her father, Jim Hunt. Maybe Jeff Jackson won because someone said, well, he had been a prosecutor and Dan Bishop had not been a prosecutor. You get down to superintendent of public instruction; that was another race in which you had a candidate that was on the extremes in terms of ideology."

As for how unaffiliated voters leaned this election, experts said it's too soon to tell. But it was surprising to them that the 18- to 29-year-old vote in North Carolina was fairly evenly split between Trump and Harris.